Couple of Launch Burps

Anyone involved with rolling out changes to production systems knows that there’s always something that goes wrong, no matter how trivial. I was bitten by two immediate issues with this week’s relaunch. One was fixed easily, the other not quite so quickly. For those interested, a run-down:

Nuking my site and starting from scratch broke use of the WordPress for iPhone application. I received the “Precondition Failed” error discussed in this thread on the WordPress Support Forum. It appears I had lines in my .htaccess file which fixed this months ago, and reapplying them restored functionality once again.

Alex King‘s Twitter Tools plugin — which provides the means for posting to Twitter anytime you publish on your blog — is not working. The title of my post will appear in Twitter, but sans URL (shortened or full). This is not a must-have feature for my site, although it does slow down my workflow to either find a fix or manually do the work a working plugin would automate. As an alternative, Tony Cecala recommended TwitPress, but from what I read it would barf on scheduled Posts. My first plan of attack is to downgrade to a previous version of the plugin, then switch to manual updates if it continues to not work. A few others have already discussed this on the WordPress Support forum here and here.

Update 2009/09/04: downgrading Twitter Tools to 1.6b2 is the current workaround to Issue #2 above. I’m awaiting a better solution when time permits.

Author: Matthew

Husband to Jenn, father to Zachary and Penelope, blogger, artist, WordPress consultant, OpenCamp organizer, and running enthusiast. Brother, can you spare an extra hour in the day?
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